This is the work blog for the KDE Visual Design Group a group of dedicated designers striving to improve community participation in design for KDE as well as design work in general for KDE applications and Plasma.

torsdag 29 maj 2014

System Settings and new VDG members

In which we introduce the work on System Settings, talk about our new members and the action group for System Settings.

Right, a while back we had some additions to the VDG team: Anditosan, Gartheco and Ken300 - I promised then that I would make little avatar images for them (which I haven't done, mea culpa etc) but that doesn't mean they've been resting or doing nothing.Gartheco joined Andrew Lake in working with the new window decorations - as I've posted about before. Being a veteran Aurorae theme designer and a QML genius he and Andrew work in tandem to fiddle with bits about that.

Anditosan and Ken300 where both doing work on System Settings redesign and joined forces with Heiko Tietze and Thomas Pfeiffer from the HIG team to work on the question "How will system settings work in the future?". Together they make up the System Settings Action Group (it's like a superhero team, only less spandex and more thinking) and if you want to contribute with ideas I can only suggest that you go to the forum and post your mockups and help out!
Now with System Settings this is a "way into the future" job - because we are working on the "bit-by-bit" production model AND lets be frank here, the devs are more or less working 24/7 getting the first version of Plasma Next out the door.
But this is what system settings will work like in the future - it's what they work on that will shape the things to come.

Also can I say something that is cool? I am right now struggling to keep up. My intray is massive, I keep trying to read blog posts and forums posts as fast as possible. Individual members of the VDG community are doing awesome work in the forums and I can hardly keep up. I spend hours trying to answer one thing and work on it, then notice someone else have already done it.
This is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Yes it's kinda harrowing but it's amazing the amount of work done.
Tomorrow I'll have a "what Jens need to do" day, and start making lists and tick them off one by one. My greatest challenge for the near future is getting the right design work and designers in contact with the right devs... THATS the tricky bit right now and where I should spend my time.

Why? Because whatever work I can do, the VDG community is doing it quicker, better and cooler than I ever could alone.

I agree that System Settings in general needs to be revamped, to me it is not that intuitive. And while I do like the concept behind the one shown in the last image of this post, I really think that you should NOT use the slightly-darker-grey font on a slightly-less-grey background. I saw that mock-up in a full resolution in a Google+ post, and I could barely read the text. Just make the text a bit darker and I think it'll be fine (I'm in particular referring to the first screenshot of the last image in this blog post).

Great progress! System Settings is such a complex and interdependent application, so if we can successfully rework that, most applications will be fairly simple to refine so long as their UI isn't tied too closely to the backend code.

Of course, it's highly likely people will be porting their applications to QML just to streamline the modification of their UIs in the future. I'm really excited for what's around the corner, since Qt has always been an awesome toolkit and it will be nice to see it shine on the desktop.

Honestly, aside from the amazing work done by the core VDG members, the willingness to accept contributions is really encouraging. I think I might actually be able to put some of my knowledge to good use in KDE if this trend continues.

Please, make the UI shown in Image 2 the standard for all settings. The amount of screen "wasted" serves to a) trace a quick relationship between items and b) quickly switch between entire branches of the settings tree. Don't think about changing it :)